.jpg The Flood Building is owned by Jim Flood, and is a loved and cherished building indeed. Details include the bust of the original Mr. Flood, now displayed in the lobby. KATY RADDATZ / The Chronicle

.jpg The Flood Building is owned by Jim Flood, and is a loved and cherished building indeed. Details include the bust of the original Mr. Flood, now displayed in the lobby. KATY RADDATZ / The Chronicle

Photo: KATY RADDATZ

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Stately icon holds flood of memories

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Like a proud father showing off his child's growth in inch marks on the wall, Jim Flood takes visitors to the photo gallery he has created in the hallway outside his office.

"Let's start way back here in the beginning of time, which is 1863. This is the corner of Market and Powell," he says. "There was nothing but a little white picket fence around the property."

The property turned into one of the world's prime pieces of real estate. It's dominated by the Flood Building, which looms over the cable car turntable and houses the Gap's flagship store.

The landmark flatiron is every bit as monumental as Flood's grandfather intended when he built it almost 100 years ago. It's Jim Flood's building now.

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He owns it, presides over it, tends to it and fusses about it. These days he's putting the finishing touches on a remodeling project that began more than a decade ago and is planning events for its 2004 centennial.

The building and the family that created it have had more lives than a reincarnated cat. A big slice of San Francisco's past and present can be found there.

Flood's great-grandfather, James Clair Flood, was one of the "Bonanza Kings" who made his fortune in the 1870s from the richest silver strike in U.S.

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The former saloon keeper, who moved from New York to San Francisco in 1849, built a mansion on Nob Hill that is now the Pacific Union Club. His son, James Leary Flood, constructed two more mansions, both on Broadway, that are now the Convent of the Sacred Heart and the Hamlin School. He also erected the Flood Building. And his son, just plain James Flood, ran it.

The four-generation line ends with his son, 64-year-old Jim Flood, or James Clair Flood II, who has three daughters and two granddaughters.

"You know, the only male in my part of the family has been a horse - and it was a gelding," says Flood, a man who laughs loudly and often.

His office on the 11th floor of the Flood Building has portraits of the three previous James Floods firmly anchored to the walls. The office is big, 1, 481 square feet, and the views are even bigger. Pacific Bell Park is visible from one window and Lower Market from the other, with the street's glassy modern inhabitants a pronounced contrast to the grandeur of the Flood Building.

The oldest family-owned commercial building in San Francisco, the Market Street matriarch survived the 1906 earthquake.

"As you can see, it's loaded with steel," Flood says, pointing to a 1904 photograph, one of 20 in his hallway.

The Flood Building had succeeded the Hotel Baldwin, built by Lucky Baldwin as a huge destination resort with ice skating rinks and swimming pools that drew guests for a month at a time. Unluckily for Baldwin, it burned to the ground in 1898.

James L. Flood's Classic Revival structure was created as a tribute to his father, the silver baron, and designed by architect Albert Pissis, whose other works include the Emporium, Hibernia Bank and the Mechanics' Institute.

"In 1904, this was really the center of San Francisco," Flood says.

A photograph from 1906 shows the Flood Building standing after the earthquake, with Market Street in smoke and everything else gone. The interior took a beating, though, and the doors were shut for two years until the damage was repaired.

In the early days, Southern Pacific Railroad's headquarters were in the Flood Building. Dashiell Hammett worked there in the 1920s as a gumshoe for Pinkerton's Detective Agency. Over the years, the Teamsters and the Internal Revenue Service also rented space. And two lawyers were slain there, in 1982 and 1990.

the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Nicaraguan Consulate and Acupuncture for Health.

In the tour of Flood's hallway, however, it is only 1937. Streetcars and cable cars are busily at work in Stewart Bloom's famous photo of Powell and Market. "We're marching on," says Flood, who acts as if every picture was taken just last week.

The gallery is his own painstaking creation. Flood inherited a quarter of the photos and got the rest from books, friends and magazines. He hung them all in dark wood frames.

Although the Floods were one of the founding families of San Francisco, they have few historical artifacts. "The family stuff," back to the Comstock Lode, was all lost in the 1906 fires at the Pacific Union Club and Flood Building.

"I don't have much of anything," Flood says. "The documents, letters, the fun things I could write a book about someday - it all went up in smoke."

In Flood's copy of the 1937 Bloom photograph, Owl Drug Co. and Clinton Cafeteria occupied part of the building's ground floor and the price of a suit was $21.50.

Two years later, on May 8, 1939, Jim Flood was born at St. Luke's Hospital in San Francisco. The family lived at the end of Vallejo Street - eight blocks from where Flood lives now. Three years later, they moved to Laguna Beach (Orange County) and then to Woodside.

Saved by the military

As a child, Flood would visit his father's wedge-shaped building occasionally - "and we heard about it at dinner all the time." His most vivid memory was of watching Gen. Douglas MacArthur's parade on Market Street after the Korean War - a war that inadvertently saved the Flood Building from a death sentence.

In 1950, Woolworth proposed a deal that Flood's father and uncle did not refuse: The five-and-dime store's management would tear the building down, replace it with a three-story modern structure, lease it for 50 years, and then return it to the Flood family.

"There was no such thing as preservation groups, and there would have been absolutely not even a peep," Flood says.

At that time, the Flood Building was the medical-dental building and had been for 40 years. Flood's father evicted all the doctors and dentists, who went to 490 Post and 450 Sutter, where they still are. The Flood Building was vacant, the wrecking ball poised, when a last-minute reprieve arrived from Washington.

The bureaucrats in the capital needed an office building in San Francisco to help manage the Korean War, and they needed it fast. Invoking the government's right of eminent domain, they quickly moved in.

"The government did my family an enormous favor, and the people of San Francisco, and anyone who enjoys looking at this building. And I'm forever grateful," Flood says.

"I couldn't believe my father would tear down a building," he says. "In today's environment, first of all, you couldn't do it, and I don't think any responsible person would have wanted to do it. My father was devastated. I remember him coming home, horrified the government had stolen his building."

Naturally, the deal with Woolworth was off. However, the government agreed to return the bottom part of the building, used for retail, and in 1952 Woolworth signed a 40-year lease.

"They totally destroyed four arches so they could put up this metal," says Flood, spitting out the word as he points to a photo showing the transformation. "It's called granulux. A horrible material that architects in the early '50s thought was the chic new stuff."

It would be four decades before Flood could remedy that indignity.

He went to high school at the elite Cate School in Santa Barbara, studied international relations at Stanford University, figuring he'd end up with the CIA or diplomatic service, and spent two years as a captain in Army intelligence.

The family business

Then he got a "starting job" at Wells Fargo, since his family had a tie to banking. The "old Comstock bird," as Flood refers to his great-grandfather, had founded the Bank of Nevada and became a large shareholder in Wells Fargo after it bought his bank.

He lived through mergers with Crocker and First Interstate and was in the top echelon, an executive vice president, when his world changed dramatically.

"I could have stayed and led a happy senior management life for many years, " Flood says. "But my father died. And my father ran the family business - this building and a big ranch in Santa Barbara County."

Flood was reluctant. It was April 1990, and he was only 50. He knew it was inevitable - he says his brother, two sisters and cousins were not interested -

but he figured it would happen when he was 55 or 60.

"I thought the timing was early and premature for me," says Flood, who moved from banking to the Flood Building the previous year after his father had a stroke. "But it turned out to be absolutely perfect. It was a new career,

a new start, a new business, a new everything."

It was a new city, too, being reshaped by sweeping demographic shifts that continue to this day.

"The Bay Area 50 years ago was a lot smaller," Flood says.

Jim Flood is rich, white, heterosexual and Republican - not a typical San Franciscan. And yet his pedigree spans most of the town's history. How aware is he, at this point, of coming from a prestigious old family?

"That's a good question," he says. "You know, when I was a child, I'd go into the Stanford Shopping Center or go into Palo Alto and constantly was I reminded of that, much to my embarrassment. Nowadays nobody gives a damn, and I don't either. So it's not a plus or a minus. Most people have never even heard the name Flood."

Flood's executive administrator, Elaine Skov, scoffs at such a notion and insists the Flood name is "bandied about" quite a bit. But she knows that the building's charm, and her boss's as well, partly rest in one inescapable fact: They are from a different time.

A building apart

The magnificent marble-and-granite lobby - one of Herb Caen's rainy-day shortcuts on the way from Market to Ellis - exerts its pull. Skov says passers- by frequently wander into the lobby with questions about the structure and leave surprised there's still a Flood in the Flood Building.

"You just walk into another era there when you walk through the lobby," says Kevin Starr, state librarian of California.

"I think the building is probably the most important commercial building architecturally in the city," says developer Chris Meany, who renovated the Flood Building a decade ago and just restored the Ferry Building.

Skov has worked in the Flood Building since Flood's father hired her in 1980. She likes the marble hallways, stairways with iron railings, high ceilings and oak doors with frosted glass. She even likes the absence of air conditioning in the office space on floors 3 through 12.

"You can throw the windows open," Skov says. "There's no cold air blowing on you. I'm never sick."

She's older than her boss but won't reveal her age. "Let's put it this way. I'm on Medicare," she says. "And Jim's father was from the old school. He never called me by my first name. Jim only calls me Mrs. Skov when he wants to make a point."

But he, too, is old school in certain ways. Skov says Flood always wears a shirt and tie except when he goes off to his duck club. And she's always in a skirt and blouse, dress or suit.

"You can tell how old we are because that's the way we are," Skov says.

She says her boss is a well-grounded and outgoing person who treats people fairly and has a good sense of humor. He's "very easy" to work for, but doesn't tolerate fools.

"He and I are just about the only ones around who use a lot of common sense anymore," she says.

Flood puts it differently, but it amounts to the same thing. "Here, it's just you," he says. "And I enjoy that."

At Wells Fargo, his jobs varied over the years: agricultural lending, leveraged buyout loans, real estate, running all the branches.

"It was a change, from a huge big business to a small family business," says Flood, who might be the only person who would describe running the Flood Building in such terms.

It was, and is, a learning process.

"At the bank, I had staffs of people working for me," he says. "If something didn't work in a branch, you called somebody who called somebody who called somebody who called somebody, and finally the window got fixed," he says. "Here, you go fix the window yourself."

Time for a face-lift

After Flood began running the building, he quickly decided that the retail part - basement, street level and second floor - needed a major face-lift. The timing was right, since Woolworth's lease was due to expire in 1992. Flood had three years to plan the renovation and slog through the city bureaucracies that would have to say yes.

Then he took the 100,000 square feet of retail and stripped it down to the steel beams, installing new heating, wiring and air conditioning that could attract major new tenants like the Gap. The original girders are visible in Urban Outfitters, a retail tenant on the Powell Street side.

The project came in on time and below budget. It inspired Flood to do something that appealed to his sense of history and aesthetics but violated his business instincts: restore the upper part of the building as well, pure cosmetic surgery that wouldn't produce a cent of revenue. The renovation totaled $15 million.

"Time had taken its real toll," Flood says.

He grabs a chunk of rock from a bookshelf. It's Colusa sandstone, and it's what the outside of the Flood Building is made of. "This fell off the building the day I got here," Flood says. "If you look carefully, there's spalling on the sandstone. It looks like a mouse just chewed on it."

Flood wanted to replace the four arches Woolworth had demolished, using Colusa sandstone. "Being a little naive and trying to put it back the way it was, I went up to Colusa - I shoot ducks up there, so I knew where Colusa was. But I had no idea where the quarry was, so I drove around."

The quarry, it turned out, was 5 miles out of town. A century ago, laborers had cut huge blocks of sandstone, dragged them on sleds and horse wagons down to the Sacramento River and put them on barges that would deliver them to the Ferry Building, where they were hauled up Market to the site of the Flood Building.

He brought some quarry pieces back to the architects and contractor. "I said, ÔWe'll quarry this stuff and replace the arches,' " Flood recalls. "And they looked at each other like, ÔThis kook has lost his marbles,' and said, ÔDo you know how much that's going to cost?' I said, ÔI don't know. That's your job to figure out. I'm the idea guy here.' "

In the end, the arches were constructed out of polymer concrete instead, at a cost of $200,000 apiece.

Some of the Flood Building's current features were its owner's inspiration -

such as the 12 red awnings.

"I copied that from the Plaza Athenee, a very fancy hotel in Paris," he says. "They used the red awnings in an interior courtyard. I remember going there as a kid with my parents. I don't know why. They just stood out."

Flood also installed a bronze bust of his grandfather in the lobby.

"My aunt made it," he says, referring to noted sculptor Mary Emma Flood Stebbins. "My mother had it in the basement at home, and she said, ÔI don't want it in the house.' I said, ÔI've got the perfect place for it.' Poor guy, there he was in the dark."

Skov says lobby visitors, who encounter the bust soon after walking through the main Market Street entrance, often want to know who it is. As for Flood, he rarely sees his grandfather - he enters on the Ellis Street side.

Mansions kept and lost

The bust used to live in the Fairmont with Flood's grandmother, Maud Flood, who moved into the nine-room penthouse for 24 years until she died in 1966 at age 90. She had grown weary of living alone in the Flood Mansion on Broadway and simply gave it to the nuns, after transporting them there by limousine and handing them the keys and a single rose.

Her husband had built the mansion for her in 1915 after the 1906 fire consumed the inside of their Nob Hill palace - where one servant's full-time job was to polish the $30,000 bronze fence all day long. James L. Flood promised to build Maud a quake-proof "house of marble on a hill of granite." And so he did.

The family also spent a good deal of time at Linden Towers, a Menlo Park mansion that resembled a wedding cake and was demolished in 1936. A large photograph of the gargantuan residence hangs in Jim Flood's office. Its demise still pains him.

"My father and aunt tore the building down. It was too big. Nobody wanted to live there. It was a creaky old thing," Flood says. "Again, how could you do it? Tear the Flood Building down, tear Linden Towers down? It would have been a fabulous museum or park or our San Simeon."

The Flood Building will be spared a similar fate. The 1976 book "Splendid Survivors: San Francisco's Downtown Architectural Heritage" called it the city's "most monumental office building" and in 1982 it became a city landmark.

On Oct. 17, 1989, the building survived its second major quake with only minor cracks in the plaster. Flood and his wife, Astrid, were in a taxi on 19th Avenue on their way from the airport when the quake struck and mistook it for four flat tires. When they got home, Flood rushed off to check out his flatiron.

"I decided it was probably not a good idea to drive downtown to see how my building was doing, so I got on my bicycle," he says.

Steamy heat, no air

Prospective tenants often are startled to learn the Flood Building is still owned by the family that built it, says building manager Sheila Marko.

"It's great to be able to say that," Marko says. "I use it as a marketing tool."

But it's not for everyone. For some, the building's character and integrity are offset by its steam heat and lack of air conditioning on the nonretail floors.

"The big old fat ladies on this side of the building are all way too hot," says Flood, whose office is on the south side, "and the skinny little ladies on the other side are all freezing in their coats. So we can never keep anybody happy, but we try to balance it."

Lawyer Thomas Williams is one of the happier tenants. He's been there since 1961.

"It's got a lot of style," says Williams, 78, as he plays a small ship captain's piano. "And where are you going to move? I have all this crap."

Office space in the Flood Building goes for $24 a square foot per year, including all common area charges, which is below average for downtown buildings. Marko says the occupancy rate is 92 percent. Office leases are five years maximum, retail more typically 10 years.

At the moment, the Flood Building is worth about $75 million to $80 million,

"The building is the grande dame of San Francisco," says commercial real estate broker Andy Edwards, a first vice president with CB Richard Ellis, who also put its market value at $75 million.

"It's very different than most office buildings in San Francisco," Flood says. "If you want 500 to 5,000 square feet, that's our niche, erring toward the lower end. Most buildings in San Francisco don't fool around with it. It's too much transaction time, too much this and that."

The Phelan Building, two blocks east on Market, is another throwback with small office spaces, which caters to some of the same market.

"We have consulates; they have jewelers," says Flood, whose building houses eight Latin American consulates. The Mexican Consulate moved late last year, after months of uproar over the congestion caused by long lines of immigrants seeking a new kind of identification card.

Turnover is high in the Flood Building - one reason office leases are limited to five years. "They are small businesses, and we all know that small businesses come and go," Flood says. "Of course, nowadays, big businesses come and go, too."

World traveler

Flood himself comes and goes a fair amount. He figures he's elsewhere at least four months of the year.

For starters, he manages the family's 37,000-acre ranch in northern Santa Barbara County, which includes 1,000 head of cattle, 500 acres of grapes and the Rancho Sisquoc winery, a small venture that produces 10,000 cases of wine a year. Some bottles grace a wood cabinet in one corner of his office - an office that was full of card tables when his father worked there.

Flood and his wife, who have been married since 1965, both like to travel. A few months ago, they went to India and did some helicopter skiing in the Himalayas. They ski for six weeks every winter in Jackson, Wyo., where one daughter lives, and Flood fly-fishes there six weeks in the summer. He also goes to Marysville to shoot ducks and quail.

Astrid Flood rides and jumps horses five days a week, and her husband took up jumping last year - along with whitewater kayaking.

The love of travel and the outdoors took hold early, says Flood's sister, Judith Wilbur of Hillsborough - two years younger than Jim, who is the oldest of four siblings.

"In those days, Woodside was much more country," says Wilbur, a major force behind San Francisco's new Asian Art Museum. "We went fishing in Bear Gulch, and we'd camp out in the redwoods."

There were several trips to Europe over the years - three-month expeditions that involved taking a ferry to Oakland, the City of San Francisco train to Chicago, another train to New York and then an ocean liner.

"That was a big deal," Wilbur says.

Travel being simpler these days, Flood does a lot more of it. He says he's amazed by how much business can be accomplished at a distance by fax, FedEx and computers. Boards and commissions are another matter.

"If you're going to participate, you got to go to a meeting. You can't do that by fax," Flood says. "Elaine - where's that list I wrote down of all these boards that I'm going to get off of?"

The list is extensive, and includes the Pacific Union Club, the Society of California Pioneers and the Union Square Business Improvement District, which he helped start and now oversees as president.

Flood lives in Presidio Heights and belongs to the Bohemian Club. He says he's a "a very conservative Republican" on fiscal issues and closer to his Democratic wife on social issues.

"She's still too far out," Flood says. Ô'So we have Ôdiscussions' about what we should do about Mr. Saddam Hussein and whether we back Nancy Pelosi - although she's an old, old friend. I don't believe in her politics, though."

Flood's conservative tastes extend to architecture.

"I like the St. Francis Hotel and the Ferry Building," Flood says. "I was one of those people who didn't like the Pyramid when it was first built. And I'm having a hard time getting used to the Marriott across the street. I'm struggling with that one."

Invariably, people who know Jim Flood use the same words to describe him: blunt, down to earth, adventurous, practical, civic-minded and caring - about his family, his building and his town.

"Noblesse oblige - that's my dad," says Karin Flood Eklund, 35, director of business development at KTB Management Group. "He's very gracious, he's the host, he's always amiable and he loves to talk. And he's always relaxed, in that way you have if you've been brought up well. He's able to interact with anyone."

He's also a "character."

"The most fun he had at Wells Fargo was Halloween," Eklund says. "One year, he was a gorilla. And one year he was God, with long angel wings."

She says her father has always been surrounded by girls: Eklund has a 2- year-old daughter, and her sister, Lisa, 36, has a 1-year-old girl. There is also Christina, 31, a Noe Valley resident who teaches Spanish in Menlo Park and is expecting a baby in August. At one point, three female dogs and three mares were also part of the Flood family.

As for the lone gelding, Eklund says, "He bucked him off."

"I'm sure my father was hoping to have a son," she adds. "Not just because of the family name but to have someone to take hunting and fishing."

When Flood's daughters turned 8, each one had to go duck hunting for a day.

"We wore our mother's waders," Eklund says. "They came up to our shoulders. We had to row him out to the blind at 5 in the morning - and he wonders why we didn't go back. It was cold and wet and damp, and there weren't a whole lot of ducks."

She remembers another time her father conscripted her. In the early '90s, when thieves were robbing tourists at Powell and Market by "helping" them buy cable car tickets, Flood asked Eklund and a friend to pose as tourists - bait for the lowlifes he hoped to nab. It didn't work. The quick-change artists knew who he was, and his daughter's Duke University sweatshirt didn't fool them.

Hands-on landlord

Leigh Ann Baughman, executive director of the Union Square Business Improvement District, recalls how, during the height of the anti-war protests in March, Flood confronted demonstrators chalking graffiti on his building.

Baughman says Flood told one girl she was damaging private property and that he'd have to clean it up. Prove it, she said. When he pulled out his business card, she apologized.

"He'll do any job he asks anybody else to do. He'll pick up trash. He's reachable, which is great for being who he is."

Since 1908, the Flood Building's next-door neighbor on Ellis Street has been John's Grill. Owner John Konstin says Flood is a "hands-on landlord" who tries hard to solve problems in his work neighborhood.

"With that kind of money you'd think you'd just stay home and enjoy your social life," Konstin says. "But he's very involved."

Meany, the developer, recalls his early impressions of Flood when they started to work together in 1989.

"I had only recently come to San Francisco. I didn't actually know the Floods were anybody. I thought Jim was a very straightforward, warm, nice guy who was just my partner doing this work," Meany says. "Over the years, I heard the stories about the family. If I'd known all this in the beginning, I probably would have stumbled all over myself making the pitch to get the job."

Working with Flood on the renovation, Meany says, added up to "three of the most enjoyable years of my life."

Meany says Flood has a strong sense of his family's history and of his role in safeguarding the Flood Building, which he sees as an "heirloom." But he's also someone who drives to Rancho Sisquoc in his Mustang convertible "to hang out on the farm and brand cattle."

"It's a big part of who he is," Meany says. "He's quirky. At the end of the day he's a guy who goes off and does his duck hunting."

Flood Building lease administrator Denise Spisak has worked at 870 Market since March 1967. She knew Flood's father as well.

Asked if they were similar, she says, "No, not whatsoever. His father was very quiet, very subdued. He was not out there. Jim is very flamboyant and assertive, and you can hear him coming."

Over the decades, the Floods surfaced regularly in the papers. For years after James L. Flood died in February 1926, a scandal involving a woman named Constance May Gavin - who claimed to be his daughter and an heir to his fortune - dominated the front pages until she got a $1.2 million settlement. More typically, the family appeared in Herb Caen's column and the society pages, with debutante balls, engagements and weddings all noted.

And parties, of course. This is how The Chronicle described a gathering in January 1947 for Anthony Eden, Britain's former foreign secretary: "A party given in his honor at the Flood home is said to have been one of the most elegantly garish fiestas since the 14th Louis entertained at Versailles. The guest list included nothing but the bon ton."

Nowadays, "bon ton" is rarely used as a synonym for high society, and the family makes fewer appearances in the papers than it used to. Jim Flood likes it that way.

He enjoys the role he plays when he goes to Jackson, Wyo., and visits daughter Lisa, who writes books with Western themes.

"She's lived there 15 years," Flood says. "I can't go into a store there without people saying, ÔOh, you must be Lisa's dad.' "

Those who know Flood say he doesn't want publicity for himself but loves it for his building. As its 100th birthday approaches, the Flood Building is likely to receive a fresh wave of attention.